For those who are curious who 'we' are, I am referring to myself, John Gump, and my long time friend and co-worker Charles Schlee. We owned a small sample company called Real Music Media. We made loops that sold pretty well, a couple of multisampled instruments in the sfz format that were often praised but rarely purchased, and we made a whole bunch of samples for Music Tech magazine.

Eventually we decided that it was eating up more of our time and trouble than it was worth. It just became another source of stress. So we stopped production, and made our catalog available for free in a downsampled and limited format. We also provided the samples and hosting for the Open Source Drum Kit and its forum.

Of course no good deed goes unpunished. Our website's domains were seized in a trademark dispute. Apparently some company owns the rights to the words 'real music'. This company concluded that their crappy search engine rankings were due to others (i.e. us) ripping them off through nefarious techniques like offering free content that people actually want.

It made little sense for us to fight a company with a legal staff on retainer, especially for a site that was already losing money, so Real Music Media went away for good.

But neither I nor Charles wanted to take our samples offline. And to make up for lost time, the samples being offered now are not the downsampled versions that were first offered for free back in 2009, but the full quality 24 bit wav and rex files that were originally offered for sale. Most of these have never before been released for free. To make things even more interesting, they are all being released into the public domain.

It is but a poor sacrifice that we offer to the Gods of Freeware. Here at KVR, their Olympus.

Last edited by herodotus on Sat Jun 29, 2013 2:22 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I am just glad that I didn't lose a domain name that I really cared about. I certainly would have put up a fight if they had gone after sordidbusiness.com, but how can two individuals prevail against a team of IP lawyers trying to pad their billable hours?

Please note that this is just a first installment, so you might want to subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to be updated about other releases.

I have been going through all of our samples to find and remove any corrupted or misnamed files, and I will put them up as I finish. This will take a while as my wife and I are buying a house, which is pretty much a full time job on its own.

Finally, I will be setting up a new forum for the Open Source Drum Kit in the next few weeks as well. It will even have its own domain name and everything.

Thanks again, and if you are feeling generous enough to spare us a second or two, we appreciate any tweeting or liking or soundcloud commenting that we can get.

eDrummist wrote:Beyond saying thanks for being so generous, I wanted to say that I really enjoyed your original songs, especially the first track on your album, "A Digital Letter." Nice work!

Well thanks!

To be honest, a bit of why I am doing this is just to bring some traffic to the site; to increase the chances of acquiring listeners for our music, and to establish the domain as uniquely our own. No one else has anything like it, and we have a DBA that allows us to do business under the name Sordid Business, so I think we are in the clear as far as the trademark trolls are concerned.

At the same time, I have always been grateful to the people who make freeware. If I can give back to the community, even in a small way, it makes me feel less like a freeloader.

Again, thanks.

ferez21 wrote:Thanks you very much for your kindness,

No problem, it's my pleasure.

and +1 on putting a donation link on the page!

Linking to our page, listening to our music, 'friending' or tweeting our soundcloud files or blog posts, these are all the donation I would ask of people. We would be grateful for any of these acts, though none are demanded or expected in any way.

Thank you John and done yesterday on all the sharing/likes I can do. Really appreciate it and looking forwards to listening on soundcloud, I don't know what to expect which is something to look forwards to tomorrow man

Dean Aka Nekro wrote:Thank you John and done yesterday on all the sharing/likes I can do. Really appreciate it and looking forwards to listening on soundcloud, I don't know what to expect which is something to look forwards to tomorrow man

They are optimized for Cakewalk Session Drummer 2, but works well with other sfz samplers. I never found the time to compile the whole kit into a single sfz, so they are grouped according to SD2's slots. The best free option to get the entire kit in one player is to load all the drums into linuxsampler and mix them to taste there. You could also use multiple instances of Plogues Sforzando.

If anyone need it, I can make a .lscp of the whole kit for linuxsampler.

We also discovered that the floor tom had some issues with the naming of the samples ("top" didnt correlate with "bottom"). However, gvnz helped me sort them out and I've uploaded the samples with correct naming here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/965 ... enamed.zip